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Maxtor OneTouch II FireWire 800

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The guys over at Trusted Reviews just posted this nice review of Maxtor’s new FireWire 800 edition of the OneTouch II. A 300 GB (279 when NTFS formatted), 7,200 RPM drive, they give it three solid scores:

    Features: 8/10
    Performance: 9/10
    Value: 9/10
    Overall: 9/10

Not bad. With three different ports in the back (one FireWire 400, one USB 2.0 and two FireWire 800), a nicely-designed case, one-touch backup and data lock features and good data transfer speeds, it’s a solid buy.
Price? Froogle says…from the low $200s to over $300.

Christian harmony, at first

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A little departure from the normal news of the day, albeit somewhat tech related: check out today’s episode of NPR’s Fresh Air (I confess, I’m a big fan), during which Terry interviews Dr. Neil Clark Warren, the founder of the online matchmaking site eHarmony.com

Despite the fact that Warren seems to be all over TV these days, pitching his site’s unique “personality profile,” I found the interview particularly interesting because it spends some time talking about the site’s history. I had no idea that much of its current popularity can be traced to time spent on conservative Christian programming run by Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family.

Warren tells Terry about the methodology behind the site’s questionnaires, which are apparently based on the interactions of some 2,000 couples he studied. She also asks him about his history with Dobson, the separation from Focus on the Family, the subject of homosexual relationships and some other stuff. Ultimately, I always find it interesting to hear from the people behind popular web sites and what they’re thinking.

Thank those larger monitors

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Now that I’ve grown to love it, I couldn’t imagine working without tabbed browsing. In the early years of the public internet I was sated by the simple fact that I had access to so much information – digesting the concept of a browser took time. Now I’m like many people out there, navigating windows crammed with tabs, jumping between applications and trying to find time for everything (while not getting distracted).

Reading this Register article got me thinking. It’s about Japanese software company NTT’s plans for an October release of SpaceBrowser, its three-dimensional web browser, which, at $275, claims to be able to render IE information in three dimensions:

Looking at the above screenshot, its easy to think of Exposé, a feature introduced in the latest version of Mac OS X:

With two Macs at home, I occasionally using Exposé, but, perhaps surprisingly, I typically forget about it and simply do a homemade organizing job, layering browser windows and clicking back and forth between them. When it comes time to move between applications, I simply do so using command-tab, which brings up a semi-transparent bar at the center of the screen and allows you to move between icons of currently open applications. I know I’m living two lives when I use these new features while falling back on old habits – I’m stacking windows that are now full of tabs!

These new ways of navigating through all of this information are a great new way of looking at the browsing experience, whether on the internet, your home computer or in corporate environments (think project management). Curiously, I think an element of this entire movement that’s easily overlooked is this: this stuff wouldn’t stand a chance without the increased prevalence of larger computer screens. Thinking back to the days of a 15″ monitor, I couldn’t imagine trying to effectively navigate through shrunken application windows floating in simulated 3D. Nowadays, I find a monitor less than 19″ completely undesirable (laptops excluded, of course).

Anyone care to comment on SpaceBrowser’s worth (or lack thereof)?

Playing media via the network

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Australian-based electronics manufacturer Zensonic just announced its new Z500 network media player. They’ve taken a CD/DVD player and gone nuts with the feature set:

    •HDMI for connecting high-def displays
    •Support for external hard drives via USB 2.0
    •Built-in 802.11g wireless
    •100Mbps ethernet
    •Access to internet weather and streaming radio

The list of supported media formats:

    •Windows Media 9 video and audio (plus the DRM version)
    •DivX
    •MPEG4
    •Audio codecs FLAC, OGG, AAC and MP3.

The company is including the Mac/Linux/Windows-compatible media server application Twonkyvision, in addition to Microsoft’s Windows Media Connect and Ahead Software’s Nero Media software. Zensonic says the Z500 will be available down under this November for AU$549, and ultimately stateside for $379 (when they find a US distributor). Europeans can get one for €329 Euros.

B Y O Mac for $200!

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Woot! With OSX for x86 torrents in the wild (legally? bah!) and blogs and tech news sites posting screenshots of some flavor of OSX running on all manner of boxes, it’s about time for someone to post a guide to building your own Mac. According to the guys at the OSx86 project, you can do it for much less than you might initially think.

Here’s what you’ll need:

    Case – $9.95
    Motherboard – $52.99
    Processor – $60.77
    2x 256 RAM – $38.00
    20 Gigabyte HD – $25.95
    DVD Drive – $12.00
    Grand total: $199.66

[props to TUAW and Make:Blog]

NCSA sez: something fishy at Yahoo!

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So the internet’s been abuzz since last week’s announcement by Yahoo! of an expansion to its web search index, and, more importantly (at least when it comes to gossip), the number of objects therein. Here are the numbers that got everyone talking, courtesy ZDNet:

    •Yahoo! – 20.5 billion objects indexed (19B documents, 1.5B images)
    •Google – 10.3 billion objects (8.2B documents, 2.1B images)
    •In June 2005 Google held a 36.9% share of the US search engine market with Yahoo! at 30.4%, according to comScore Networks.

So people start talking, Google fires back (saying it was “baffled” by Yahoo!’s claims), and some other big boys stepped in, in this case the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). After performing their own study, they came to the following conclusions:

    Based on the data created from our sample searches, this study concludes that a user can expect, on average, to receive 166.9% more results using the Google search engine than the Yahoo! search engine. In fact, in the 10,012 test cases we ran, only in 3% of the cases (307) did Yahoo! return more results. In 96.6% of the cases (9676) Google returned more results. In less than 1% of the cases (29) both search engines returned the same number of results.

    It is the opinion of this study that Yahoo!’s claim to have a web index of over twice as many documents as Google’s index is suspicious. Unless a large number of the documents Yahoo! has indexed are not yet available to its search engine, we find it puzzling that Yahoo!’s search engine consistently returned fewer results than Google.

Ouch. There is no way this one’s over yet.

[kudos to BoingBoing]

Duh

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David Pogue of the New York Times wrote a nice review of SanDisk’s Ultra II SD plus memory card last week, which I read and promptly forgot about until this morning. It’s definitely worth mentioning, because until now nobody seemed to have thought about producing a memory card able to circumvent that nearly ubiquitous element of digital photography and memory cards: the memory card reader.

Tiny built-in hinges let the card fold in half, exposing a USB plug devoid of the usual metal shield. Simply insert it into your computer and it behaves like a flash drive. Admittedly, the thing is darn tiny, and Pogue justifiably expresses concern over the possibility of those hinges breaking – he mentions a SanDisk rep’s promise that the cards are designed (and guaranteed) to endure some 5,000 open/close cycles.

Also sweet news: not paying a price premium for the little buggers. Nice work, SanDisk. Here’s a Froogle link for all y’all interested in buying one.

Podcasting public officials

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More people keep joining up.

According to this article in Public CIO magazine, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm started sending out her weekly radio address via Podcast earlier this month. Released each friday at 10 a.m., the Governer hopes, in typical government-ese, “to talk directly to the citizens of Michigan about what their government is doing to improve their state for them.” Seems straighforward enough, albeit rather broad.

Nonetheless, props to the administration’s bold attempt at embracing a new technology favored among those ever-present “young people.” Now if they could only get the aformentioned whippersnappers to actually listen to an audio file likely chock-full of budgetary, legal and other administrative news.

    “Hey man, what are you listening to?”
    “Oh, just the Governor’s weekly podcast.”
    < silence >
    “Um…cool…”

FedEx goes solar, in style

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Given this past week’s lack of positive publicity surrounding the FedExFurniture/Jose Avila fracas [see this post], here’s some love for the shipping giant:

Last week FedEx became the proud owner of California’s largest corporate solar-power installation to date when they activated the photovoltaic cells covering the roof of their package processing hub at Oakland Int’l Airport. The 904 kW array covers nearly all of the building’s 81,000 square-foot roof and can meet roughly 80 percent of the facility’s energy needs. It was designed and built by California-based PowerLight Corp., using 300,000 solar cells from Japan’s Sharp Corp.

iBible brings you…iGod?

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Just when I thought the number of types of iPod iGear could not get any greater, someone’s found a way to let the little bugger help its devotees get closer to…God. Find a bare spot in that belt and cut one more notch, ok?

CNET.com’s Apple blog mentioned last week’s release of Laridian’s iPocketBible. Not content to include simply the complete text, these guys have put together a product with more than 73 hours of narration, courtesy of Christian radio personality Mike Kellogg. It’s available for $49.99 through the company’s web site.

Let the iWorship begin.

Plextor's USB/LAN external drive reviewed

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The guys at BIOS Magazine just put up a nice review of Plextor’s new USB/LAN external hard drive, the PX-EH25L. Aimed primarly at the small business network, BIOS likes the form factor, built-in connectivity and print server functionality but mentions that setup requires a bit of networking know-how. Other gripes include lack of built-in DHCP, no FireWire port and no write protection switch. Specs are as follows:

    •250 GB
    •7200 RPM
    •8 MB buffer
    •Average seek time of 8.2 ms
    •Single 10/100 ethernet port
    •Two USB 2.0 ports (for connecting another drive or a printer)
    •Power switch and power/activity LEDs

The review does have a few factual discrepancies/typos, most notably a sentence saying the device is compatible with Windows and the Mac, immediately followed by one telling readers to forget about connecting it to a Mac or Linux. Right now the drive seems to be found only on Plextor’s European site, which lists Windows compatibility.

BIOS lists a retail price of £199, but a Froogle search reveals one seller willing to part with these drives for greenbacks — nearly 400 of them.

Violent games ≠ aggression

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So Devin Moore got the death penalty for killing three police officers in 2003, but his subsequent attempt to use GTA as an excuse isn’t faring well. With Rockstar off the hook, perhaps we can spend more time thinking about our society’s complete lack of personal responsibility the ways in which video games influence kids, newly important for this reason:

A study released by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which claims to be the first long-term study of this type, found that “robust exposure” to a violent game did not directly translate into real-world aggression. The key points:

Gamers played MMORPG Asheron’s Call 2 for an average of 56 hours over the course of a month, and researchers found “no strong effects associated with aggression caused by this violent game,” said lead author Dmitri Williams. Aggression was determined my measuring “argumentative behaviors” before and after gaming, which were then compared to a non-game playing control group.

Understandably, Williams is unwilling to make strong predictions based on the results of his study. Notably, the study did not look at teenagers, nor did its exposure of participants to fantasy-style violence mirror urban, GTA-style violence recently made famous by Moore. But Williams’ take-home message is noteworthy:

    Games are about solving problems, and it should tell us something that kids race home from school where they are often bored to get on games and solve problems. Clearly we need to capture that lightning in a bottle.

[Cheers to Science Blog.]